CaMP Anthropology

Patricia G. Lange on her new book, Thanks for Watching

March 9th, 2020

https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3737-thanks-for-watching

Interview by Jan English-Lueck

Jan English-Lueck: You have been writing about YouTubers, on and off screen, for over a decade. How is this book continuing themes you have been developing for a long time and what is a departure from your previous work?

Patricia G. Lange: My work has oriented around empathetically exploring nuances of mediated interaction to understand the allure of interacting in digital spaces. Throughout my career, criticism of mediated interaction has persistently been very harsh—from scholars and the public. Yet, mediation is part of the human experience. My current book similarly tries to understand why vlogging (video blogging) and sharing the self through media was so important to YouTubers interested in sociality. My past and current research challenges the notion that mediated interaction is simply parasitic to and less meaningful than in person interaction. The sociality YouTubers experienced was emotional and real—both online and off. Even going back to my dissertation, I have been concerned with problematic talk and issues of online access. Back then troublesome participants were called “flamers” and today YouTubers complain about “haters”—groups that exhibit differences but also similarly produce chilling effects to participation. I have explored how digital spaces facilitate or challenge democratized participation. This book continues this passion by analyzing experiences of YouTubers who originally saw the site as a place of tremendous possibility for offering a potentially democratized space for self-expression and interaction. Thanks for Watching traces the initial excitement and eventual ensuing complications that an interconnected group of people experienced. It explores difficulties such as haters, competition brought on by monetization, and changes in content. It also analyzes technical complications such as algorithmic rankings that privilege certain types of content over quiet, social videos. The book concludes by providing advice and recommendations when conducting ethnography in digital spaces. It also provides information about what might be changed to renew a corner of YouTube for sociality, or perhaps to more ambitiously create new video sharing sites that fundamentally support interaction.

In the past, my work has centrally revolved around issues of analyzing technical identities, and how “geeks” socialize to learn and project an aura of being an expert. Thanks for Watching departs from this research program. Identity work has been important for many online studies, but other interesting rubrics exist. Inspired by Lefebvre, my book uses the lens of “rhythm analysis” to explore how temporalities, rhythms, and interactions over time shape video-mediated sociality. For example, an arrhythmia is an irregular rhythm, one which often indicates a problem. YouTubers at times experienced arrhythmias between honoring their creative pace of production and satisfying the relentless demands of audiences and algorithms. At times creators could not keep up with such requests and took a break. Disruptions in posting video content might be observed by viewers who became concerned when video making output became irregular. It could feel as if a collective was in tune with a video maker and was watching out for them. Focusing attention on such patterns leads to significant analytical insight, especially in terms of seeing such deep and widespread connections as illustrative of our increasingly “posthuman” condition. I remain circumspect about usage of this term, which has the unfortunate connotation of asserting we are no longer human. Yet, we are far from being robots or files containing a downloaded consciousness. Nevertheless, I chose to explore this rubric given that some of its characteristics can quite clearly be observed on YouTube. Collectives of interconnected people, artifacts, commercial interests, and technical operations are deeply influencing how people express the “self” in both communal and troublesome ways.

Jan English-Lueck: You observed an actual drum circle at a YouTube meet-up in Toronto. You then observed it is an appropriate metaphor for video sharing. Could you tell us more about how that metaphor illuminates participatory cultures?

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Michelle Williams takes the page 99 test

March 2nd, 2020

One half of page 99 of my doctoral thesis is a photo, taken at eye level of a group of Tongan students sitting cross-legged on the ground of their school courtyard in Auckland, New Zealand. They are rehearsing for an upcoming cultural festival that is the central topic of my research. I am sitting, unseen, with the students as we learn the performance item together. The movement of our bodies and voices has become synchronous over several weeks of practice and in this moment, the production of culturally-specific movement and sound is a uniting factor among myself and the student participants. However, the image also represents a key problem central to my fieldwork methodology: although membership in a music-community transcends difference in some ways, how would I bridge the spaces created by authority, power, ethnicity and age? How could I represent young people’s experiences effectively and help to bring their voices to the fore within a discipline that often excluded them? These questions were significant components in constructing my research model.

My research approach was informed by both Pacific research frameworks and recommendations from ethnomusicology, many of which overlapped in their emphases on relationships, collaboration, and reciprocity. Educational research helped me to problematize how I would represent myself to students, and was essential guidance to the shifting roles I undertook as a learner, music-community supporter and friendly teacher (the latter during the focus groups we co-created). Throughout my fieldwork I attempted to daily to bridge the spaces created by my adult authority and my privileges as a white American researcher, through shared love of popular music, my immigrant status, my Christian upbringing and the common goal of representing “our” school at the cultural festival. Although I had to concede a number of limitations, I was pleased that ultimately the experiences and viewpoints of the students were a major component of my findings, and included several “firsts” in research with Pacific youth in New Zealand.

Michelle Ladwig Williams. 2019. The ASB Polyfest: Constructing Transnational Pacific Communities of Practice in Auckland, New Zealand. University of Auckland, Phd.
Monica Heller’s Reflections upon Retirement

February 24th, 2020

Photo courtesy of EGSS Conference 2015

How did you discover linguistic anthropology? Why did it attract you?

I kind of sidled into it. The initial interest came from growing up in Montréal in the 60s, when everything in everyday life was about language choice, as part of navigating struggles over social difference and social inequality. Somehow it seemed obvious that all this pain and anger and fear couldn’t actually be about language itself; also, I wanted to understand how it made sense to people to take the very different positions they took, without having to assume anyone was inherently evil or insane. I discovered there was a thing called linguistics because my father, who liked hanging around bookstores, came home one day with a magazine for me that featured a cover story about Chomsky. It took me a while to figure out that generative grammar was not going to give me the tools I needed, but it was really helpful to have to figure out why. By this time, I was in college, and saw that an anthropology professor had put a course on Sociolinguistics on the books.

Back in Montréal, “sociolinguistique” was becoming a thing: it was used by academic researchers to investigate the question of the variability of French (a highly charged question in the context of linguistic minority political mobilization) and government ones to develop and implement language policy as part of the construction of Québec as a francophone quasi- or proto-nation-state (as is common in Canada, the relationship between the two spaces of production of la sociolinguistique was close). Also, my mother had gone back to university to study sociology around then, and sent me off to meet two key people she had met there: Gillian Sankoff, at the Université de Montréal, and Pierre Laporte, at the Office de la langue française.

It wasn’t until I went to grad school that I learned there was a thing called linguistic anthropology; to this day, I’ll use whatever label works. I really only use linguistic anthropology for moving around the United States. But the main lesson I retained from all of this is that there often are tools in unexpected places for addressing questions that are bugging you, so it’s a good idea to keep your eyes open. Also, people are really helpful, so you shouldn’t be afraid to knock on someone’s door, even if you’re some 18 year old whose mother took a lecture course with this person ten years earlier.

Why did you decide to study in the United States? What was that like?

Ah, yes. So that wasn’t necessarily the plan. University was definitely the plan; we’re talking immigrant/refugee Jews, do I need to say more? The expectation was that I would follow the footsteps of my parents, aunts and uncles and go to McGill. Then my father found out someone was developing a sideline in advising high school students regarding U.S. schools; in Montréal, going to university in the US, France or England was definitely upward mobility (yes, the relics of colonialism). England required A-levels; France seemed way too unstructured. So – the US, especially its liberal arts programs: there was nothing like that in Canada. Long story short, although I think we all figured I wouldn’t get in and would end up at McGill anyway, I got into Swarthmore, attractive not only because of its liberal arts program and history as a coeducational institution, but also because of its Quaker and pacifist orientation. I went, curious about this powerful country close by, familiar and yet… so strange.

Then, I decided I wanted to go to grad school. It was clear that the two places where I could actually study exactly what I wanted were Berkeley and Stanford. California felt even farther from any world I was familiar with, but I applied anyway; figuring, again, I won’t get in, so I’ll also apply to work with Gillian Sankoff at the Université de Montréal, because she said that although she couldn’t train me in the ethnographic methods I wanted to use, she would let me do what I wanted. I got into Berkeley, as it happens, though during my frequent and lengthy research stays in Montréal I was fortunate to be welcomed both in Sankoff’s seminars and in Pierre Laporte’s Service de recherche sociolinguistique at the OLF, profiting hugely from their intellectual and human generosity. So, the best of both worlds.

Although perhaps not a perfect fit in either (but not quite fitting available categories is the story of my life, and I have learned to make good use of it). In Québec, I had these odd, if interesting, ideas about ethnography and the politics of everyday life, quite different from the approaches dominant in Québec at the time: the social psychology of language, technical-yet-engaged language policy, quantitative census-based measures of ethnolinguistic inequality (“démolinguistique”), variationist and lexicographic studies of French.

At Berkeley, strictly speaking, I was an international student; as such, I was expected to eventually go home in order to use the knowledge I acquired in the US to participate in my country’s development. My work in Québec made total sense in that frame (to my fellow students and to my teachers). But at the same time, I was white and my English was way too good; its occasional oddities (oh come on, say “about” for us again) tended to take people aback. No one ever explained the US to me; I was expected to know it. Which in fact sometimes I did (years of watching WCTV Plattsburgh New York helped), until, oops, I didn’t. I was also expected to naturally desire to stay and be American – it would be so easy for me. And I might have, except I didn’t actually want to.

How did you end up an academic in Canada? Was that a career plan you had?

Again, no, not really, I certainly had no particular fixation on being an academic. I thought about writing the exam for the diplomatic corps (both Québec and Canada), or the civil service. I figured I’d end up in language policy somehow; there were lots of models (Pierre Laporte was one of them). But the machine of US grad schools includes applying for university jobs, so I did. I was offered one at LSU in Baton Rouge; I turned it down, partly because opportunities for my partner (an American archaeologist) were limited, but really, I think, because I didn’t want to be there, despite the real interest working in Louisiana presented. The Canadian partner of a grad school buddy of my partner gave me his old copies of a publication which included job ads for academics; there was an out-of-date ad for a post doc in Toronto which offered the possibility of working in the Franco-Ontarian community. The deadline was long past, but I called. They hadn’t been able to fill the position, bizarrely. Anyway, the post-doc turned into a research position, which turned into directing a research centre, which turned into a tenure rack job. Toronto was also outside the known universe, and still is for many Québécois – while I had lived in England, France, the former Yugoslavia and the US, it was only when I got to Toronto that that my family asked whether it is possible to eat okay in this new place. Which, when you think about it, made it a perfect fit for me.

How have you navigated anglophone and francophone worlds?

I love being able to not be stuck in one linguistic market, and to be forced to think about the same thing differently, or about different things altogether (I am not being all Whorfian here, it’s not the languages, it’s the discursive spaces). I am privileged, obviously, to be even able to participate in two such powerful ones. And even so, it gets complicated. For one thing, there’s the eternal problem of the fact that it is the English-language journals that count more (not to mention that it is the ones based in the US or the UK, not Canada). So I have done some strategizing around which language to publish in, for which audiences. Obviously, its easier to make these choices once you have tenure. But yes, it has been really important to me to develop spaces of knowledge production that are not only in English and not only in the big centres. The centre-periphery thing remains an issue; if you write about the US or France you can be seen as doing theory, or broad issues of general interest. If you write about Canada, you’re writing about Canada. And then there is the language issue. First, you have to turn in a monolingual performance; none of this mixing languages stuff. You can write about it, just don’t actually do it. I do sometimes get some comments on my English, but I was trained in the US, and Canada is understood as having some kind of good neutral English, so that part is easy. I did have to be taught to do academic writing in French; I have Denise Daoust at the OLF who helped me write my first grant application in 1978, and my colleagues in Toronto in the 1980s with whom we did text-exchanges, to thank for that. But the conditions of the market are different; there is more attention to “la qualité de la langue” more policing of language in general. The hierarchy, as it affects me, is France-Québec-rest of Canada. No one believes there are francophones in Toronto; I really believe that when both Québécois and French see my affiliation, they think “oh oh, her French is going to be awful” (plus my name – what is that anyway? Maybe her married name?). Anyway, I am especially proud of having made an editor of the French journal Langage et Société back down, decades ago; I felt they were being all judge-y about la qualité de ma langue. For a sociolinguistics journal, I argued, it seemed odd to not be able to handle discursive variability. They had to agree I had a point. But again – write about it, just don’t do it.

How have you handled being a woman in academia?

I’m tempted to say “poorly”, which is to say that I could have struggled more loudly. The upside has been being non-threatening, until, well, I got too much power. I have the usual stories to tell about family not taking me seriously, and then doing their best to sabotage me when I didn’t make the right sacrifices; the awful stress of trying to get a job and tenure while having kids and raising them – I’d say I lost my first marriage largely over those issues, even though we really really tried in many ways to make it all work. And of course I beat myself up all the time over whether I did right by my kids. At work, I had one horrible experience of screaming sexism (symbolic violence, rest assured, not physical). And a bunch of everyday ones, the ones I suppose would now be called microaggressions. One huge advantage of having been trained as an interactionist is that I have the tools to unpack the sequences and use the rules to my advantage. The one I like the most is how I responded to being overlooked in favour of a male panellist on a TV show; I noticed he moved into the conversational space a microsecond before the animateur finished his turn. So I worked on beating him to it, and it worked! It’s been difficult to know where to draw the line in mentoring; I don’t really want to be everyone’s mother (I have two kids of my own, I always say), but at the same time I know how important it is to not pretend we are pure disembodied intellects. So maybe the right answer to the question is “it’s been a struggle, but welcome to the universe; I have done my best to struggle well”.
Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine on their new book

February 17th, 2020

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/signs-of-difference/E69813363E4CD9927C6C8E1BD2FC3011

Interview by Hannah McElgunn

Hannah McElgunn: Signs of Difference begins with analyses that draw from long term ethnographic engagement in two very different places: Bóly, a town in Southwest Hungary, and a rural, Wolof-speaking town in Senegal. How has working together, across such seemingly different fieldsites, influenced the approach to language and social life that you present in this book?

Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine: Our collaboration started with those unexpected parallels between our separate ethnographic projects. Reading each other’s papers and listening to each other at AAA meetings, we saw amazingly similar processes in two fieldsites that were utterly worlds apart. The happy result has been a semiotic approach to difference, an approach that is much wider than our own ethnographies but is well illustrated by them. Our book is mainly devoted to developing and explaining that approach, but it begins by showing how it applies to the two ethnographic cases.

In the German-Hungarian town in Hungary as in the Wolof-speaking town in Senegal, people were making distinctions among themselves not only through the way they spoke but also through different forms of emotional expression, clothing, houses and numerous other signs and activities. Language, social organization, geography, history, were all quite different. But in both towns, as it happened, one social category of people spoke and acted in relatively reserved, restrained ways; the other category, by contrast, seemed to be more elaborate in everything, more vivid, dramatic. These were stereotypes of difference. People oriented to these social types, often enacting them in their everyday lives. But how to understand the weird parallels between the two towns? “Restrained” vs. “elaborate” were the ways the people in our two towns characterized their own differences. But when we read fieldwork by others, we saw that although there were always overarching cultural distinctions that organized relations between contrasting sets of people and signs, those distinctions could be quite different from ours. For instance, there was: tough vs. soft in one place but in another pragmatic vs. political. To understand our own examples and others, our explanations would have to be quite abstract. And semiotic.

The book explicates step-by-step a semiotic process of differentiation, with several aspects, that encompasses all the cases. Contrast – as axis of differentiation – is the fundamental idea. Contrasts in expressive signs pointed to contrasting categories of identity; and the qualities attributed to the signs were also attributed to the people-types indexed by the signs. For those familiar with a particular cultural context, the signs of each identity seemed to cohere and to display the same qualities as the people types they point to. We turned our hand to American and historical examples: How did Yankees come to be thought different types of people than Southerners in 19^th century US? How do faculty differentiate among themselves at an American university? How did the National Rifle Association divide in the course of a crucial political battle? And how do the axes of differentiation themselves change? It was very exciting to work out how the semiotic process we propose illuminates relations between whatever culturally-specific qualities are involved.

Hannah McElgunn: As you note, C.S. Peirce hoped that “a converging, objective portrait of the world” would result from different actors continually refining the conjectures of their peers (88). This is opposed to the project you take on in this book, part of which is to detail the “construction of perspectives that are partial, conventional, and positioned” (88). Yet, despite the fact that Peirce’s larger project differs so strikingly from yours, his semiotic theory plays a foundational role in your “Ingredients” section. How have you come to understand Peirce as useful for the analysis of social life, despite your divergence? (more…)
Jennifer Hsieh takes the page 99 test

February 10th, 2020

Jennifer Hsieh Page 99 Test

Media scholars, philosophers, and anthropologists have all written about noise—that mysterious sonic object that can be grating to the ear at the same time that it becomes a celebrated call to human action. “Let’s make some noise!” is a phrase that unleashes a liberatory self, daring the addressee to break away from the “same ol’, same ol’,” of everyday life. In other instances, noise is unwelcomed. News reports over the past few years have covered the case of US diplomats’ exposure to a high-pitched, screeching sound that may have caused neurological damage. This linkage has not yet been proven, but that has not stopped researchers from weighing in on the case.

Given the mercurial ways in which noise captures the social and political imagination, I took a radical commitment towards the empirical in my dissertation, Noise Governance and the Hearing Subject in Urban Taiwan (2017). An ethnography of environmental noise control in Taiwan, I investigated the technological and material efforts of citizens, bureaucrats, and acousticians toward incorporating hearing and listening into the social and political domain. I examined the interplay between a technocratic definition of noise and the individual experience of noise by shadowing noise inspectors to a variety of sites, including construction zones, restaurants, and apartment buildings.

At first listen, the everyday sounds of Taipei exist multiple worlds apart from the effervescent noise at protests, or the weaponized noise of political affairs. Nevertheless, these different registers exemplify ways in which noise participates in and produces social worlds. As I found in my research, the symbolic and metaphorical treatments of noise were not wholly separate from a mechanical approach to noise and, in fact, informed one another.

On page 99, I delineate the interests of different stakeholders in Taiwan’s noise control system: “While government agents utilized health and environmental discourse on noise to exercise political and social control over Taiwanese subjects, individual citizens called for increased noise control as a form of civic activism to hold the government accountable for managing the people.” Continuing on, I trace the double-bind of noise control that attends to the social and political needs of both citizens and the state: “On the one hand, noise control supported environmental rights from a liberal progressive view by advocating for a healthy and safe living environment. On the other hand, these social movements were used as substitutes for continued social and political control by a regime with roots in authoritarian forms of governance. In other words, both liberal progressive and authoritarian agendas utilized environmental and public health in the service of conflicting discourses: one for civic activism in advocating for citizens’ rights; the other for the continued justification of government oversight over everyday life.” Given the divergent, contradictory accountings of noise in Taiwan, it is difficult to determine whether noise is celebrated or unwanted; instead, noise is that which keeps the conversation going, producing political subjects by way of the sounded environment. By considering the multiple agendas held by various parties around noise control in Taiwan, I examine how the object of noise remained an enduring social and political phenomenon precisely because of the way it exceeded both official and civic efforts to systematize it.

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Hsieh, Jennifer. 2017. Noise Governance and the Hearing Subject in Urban Taiwan. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University.

Jennifer Hsieh is an LSA Collegiate Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her current book project is a study of the scientific, bureaucratic, and audiovisual practices underlying the production of environmental noise from early twentieth-century Taiwan to the present. She has previously held research fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Vossius Center at University of Amsterdam, and Fairbank Center at Harvard.
Jasmine Folz on her dissertation

February 3rd, 2020

Page 99 of my dissertation about free and open source software in India begins with a description of children dancing at a community centre in a Bengaluru slum. This community centre is run by the Free Software Movement of Karnataka, who invited me to spend the weekend with them in October 2016. Following the discussion of dancing I transition to a conversation I had with one of the activists, a middle class man in his 20s I call Rohit. He told me that these are the children of maids before sharing that he always felt he should be nice to maids but he had not considered their lives outside of his home. Working with these children has shifted his awareness of their lived experience and he now visits some of their homes in the slum. I then discuss the fact that although the free software activists have come together to promote free software, that this centre:

…represent[s] their significant commitment to using their mission as a technologically defined group toward social ends. The fact that the software they are using on the old PCs in the centre is free is imperative to the activists. However, the activists accept that to the students who visit the centre, the nuances of free software are almost irrelevant within the context of their need for practical help with school, exposure to the possibilities outside of their habitus, and a safe space to relax and just be kids.

I suggest this ability to downplay the groups’ stated mission can be understood as an extension of Indian middle class activism which has historically used a variety of tools to ameliorate social inequalities. The page then transitions to the next section of the chapter outlining the history of the middle classes in India during British colonial rule.

This test holds for my example. Indeed, this page epitomises much of my dissertation. Namely that free software in India is a technology which is mobilised towards social ends by a relatively elite group of practitioners attempting to improve their nation on multiple fronts. Rather than creating software, the Indian free software community spends most of its energies in the social work of evangelising to students, government, and industry. My dissertation ultimately argues for contextualising technology within political, economic, and sociological contexts as a corrective for much of STS which, despite its many valuable insights into how technology is created and understood, overly focusses on analysing circuits and flows of power all the while gliding over and around the structures that create, maintain, and reproduce power. Rather than describing how different actors are connected within networks which constantly, simultaneously reshape themselves, by showing how technology has developed and been wielded in different times and places to different political and economic ends we are better equipped to work towards mobilising technology for a different and more equitable future.

Jasmine Folz. 2019. Free and Open Source Software in India: Mobilising Technology for the National Good. University of Manchester, Phd.

Jasmine Folz is currently a senior social researcher for a small consultancy in London called Alma Economics.
Nicholas Emlen on his book, Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier

January 26th, 2020

https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/language-coffee-and-migration-on-an-andean-amazonian-frontier

Interview by Gaya Morris

This book is an ethnography of multilingualism in the Alto Urubamba Valley, on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru. Here, Indigenous Amazonian Matsigenka people and Quechua-speaking migrants (colonos) from the nearby Andean highlands live densely interconnected lives. The book explores how people from different backgrounds move between Matsigenka, Quechua, and Spanish in the many contexts of their everyday lives, as they transform the rain forest into farmland and become coffee producers for the first time.

Gaya Morris: You claim that the ethnic categories of Colono and Matsigenka “are crucial principles of difference in the local social world” but are not “empirical and analytical categories that reliably correspond to actual patterns of interaction, behavior, and language, or even to individuals” (9-10). So what role do these imaginary categories perform in processes of social differentiation and exclusion? What differences do they not mark that they are often assumed to?

Nicholas Emlen: Gaya, thank you for your interest in the book, and for your thoughtful questions.

The language ideology of the “ethnolinguistic group” has a strong hold on the way scholars talk about the social panorama of South America, and also on the way it is conceptualized on the ground. This ideology encourages us to think about Matsigenkas and Andean migrants (colonos) as clearly delineable aggregates of people. But when you look more closely at the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier, it becomes clear that things are a lot more complicated, and that these categories are quite negotiable and contextual.

To understand why, it helps to start by thinking about interethnic marriage, which is by now the rule rather than the exception among Matsigenka speakers in the Alto Urubamba. Most Quechua-speaking migrants to the valley are men, and many end up in unions with Matsigenka women. They either bring those women with them upriver toward the highlands, or those couples stay together in the lowlands. This makes it more difficult, in turn, for Matsigenka men to find spouses, so they travel further downriver and into the remote tributaries to start families, or to bring women back upriver. The result is an opposed system of migratory flows: men move downriver, bringing Quechua with them, while women move upriver, bringing Matsigenka with them.

As a result of this regional interplay between migration, gender, kinship, and language, many children across the Alto Urubamba frontier are growing up in trilingual households, and with a foot in both social worlds. However, this interconnectedness is quite in contrast to the region’s rigid discourse of ethnicity, which takes Matsigenkas and colonos to be distinct groups of people. It’s interesting to see how this disjuncture plays out. For instance, among one group of siblings I know, some live with their mother in a titled Matsigenka community, attend a Matsigenka-Spanish bilingual school, and get counted in the census as ethnically Matsigenka. A few of their siblings live with their father in a nearby colono settlement, attend a Quechua-Spanish bilingual school, and don’t get counted as Matsigenka in the census. With respect to exclusion, the kids living in the colono settlement find themselves treated as ethnic outsiders among their Andean peers. Meanwhile, their siblings in the Matsigenka community are treated as colono interlopers. It’s not an easy situation for anyone. The point is, these categories play out differently depending on the context of interaction, and on the perspective of the interactants.

Gaya Morris: You suggest that “recognizing the interconnectedness of Andeans and Amazonians in the Alto Urubamba is not just an academic matter; it also holds important political significance” (16). What might be the political consequences of overlooking the interconnectedness of these two regions and groups?

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Don Kulick on his book, A Death in the Rainforest

January 20th, 2020

https://www.workman.com/products/a-death-in-the-rainforest

Excerpted from original New Books Network podcast

https://newbooksnetwork.com/don-kulick-a-death-in-the-rainforest-how-a-language-and-a-way-of-life-came-to-an-end-in-papua-new-guinea-algonquin-books-2019/

Transcribed by Shulan Sun; Lightly edited by Ilana Gershon for clarity

Alex Golub: Now, many people who don’t study Papua New Guinea but who are involved in anthropology will know Papua New Guinea through the work of Marilyn Strathern, [or] in a slightly different way, maybe Roy Wagner. And Marilyn describes Papua New Guineans as having dividual selves or, they have this very exotic theory that their selves condense many relationships. You provide a very individualist portrait of Gapuners. They tend to really value their autonomy and are encouraged to be self-reliant. What should people who read Strathern think – how would you recommend reconciling that with your portrayal, which seems a little bit different?

Don Kulick: I don’t really know what to do with that because I think Marilyn Strathern’s understanding of Papua New Guinea is very heavily – and I am sure that she would be the first to agree – it’s very highly based on her experience with highlanders. Now again, Papua New Guinea is a very big country, there’s lots of different cultures. It is not all the same. I also thought Marilyn was writing in a very sort of abstract way – I don’t think she will actually say that people see themselves as dividuals. That is an anthropologist’s understanding of Papua New Guineans’ sociality.

And what I see in Gapun is, certainly, people are connected to one another. I mean, sorcery is a great connector. Because, if I do something, then I don’t have to die, but maybe my nephew will die, or my sister will die. So again, we are all connected in that way and my actions will influence other people, often in ways, or sometimes in ways that go against their own self-interest. And I have an example from the book. If somebody steals a battery that somebody managed to buy somewhere: I steal a battery and got caught. I can say that I did it, but it wasn’t me, somebody made me do it. And that is a perfectly acceptable excuse in Gapun. Which again, ties to the notion of dividuality – that we are the conduits of action, but we are not the agents of action. So, in that sense, I think that’s very similar. But again, what I saw in Gapun, from the very start, was not only how people are incredibly, incredibly individualist, it’s really all about themselves. But they are socialized to be that way. Babies are continually being socialized like “it’s not yours, it’s mine!” “Whose is it?” And, you know, I think people who even work in highlands, I am thinking of Bambi Schieffelin’s work, for example, she writes about that constant question: “who does this belong to?” That is a crucial fact for anything – in order to do anything, use, or steal, or eat, or throw it away, you have to know that. So, there’s an ownership thing that really socializes people into standing up for the rest. You know, the kroses you were mentioning earlier, the swearing, it’s all about women saying: “This was mine, you destroyed it, you screwed with it, I am pissed off at you, and I am now abusing you for it.”

So again, in this network of connectedness, individuals are continually being made. But I think that the way to reconcile this is to understand that individuals are, they are not American individuals, they are not Swedish individuals. They are individuals that emerge against a background of networks that I think Marilyn Strathern does a fantastic job describing.

Alex Golub: Yea, they are individuals, but they are very permeable.

Don Kulick: That’s a good way of putting it, exactly. They’re permeable. They’re continually being impressed by other people’s wills, by their desires, by everything. So, yes, I have had very confusing conversations with people who steal things from me in the village. I asked a young man: “Why did you take my soap?” “Because I asked you for it and you didn’t give it to me. Therefore, you made me steal it.” “But it’s the only soap I have!” [laugh] So, again, I find this very curious. I see humor in it, but I also see that this is how people die. I mean, you always die because somebody did something to you. And it doesn’t have to be you who did it, somebody else did it. And you’re dying for that person’s wrongs.

Alex Golub: Yeah.

Don Kulick: But again, you’re the one who dies. Nobody else dies. That’s how the individual emerges. It is, again, I think this is also Marilyn Strathern’s point, it’s the individual emerges out of relationship. I see this very clearly in Gapun. I think the tonality, or the tenor of individualism is perhaps different in Gapun when compared to the highlands. But I do think that we’re all connected in the sense that we all influence one another, in ways we can’t control and don’t understand. It’s very Papua New Guinean.

Alex Golub: I think the upside of it, for some people, is that it prevents accumulation, and it prevents centralization of power. But then, the downside of it is that it prevents organization or anything getting done.

Don Kulick: Absolutely. I mean, Gapun could be a case study for that.

Alex Golub: One of the sorts of melancholy dimensions of – this melancholy situation is the “language death” that you also include in the title. Can you tell me a little bit more what it’s like to watch this language die? And it seems like of those contrarian themes in this book in addition to some of those contrarian ones you might talk about, is that you don’t have the standard take on language death – that there are these precious languages that have to be preserved that when they die, the world loses a precious bit of diversity. That’s not exactly what you’re saying, is that right?

Don Kulick: It’s not what am I saying. And I have deep respect for linguists who work with endangered languages. I really do. But, I think there are many linguists who work with endangered languages these days who go for the biodiversity trope claiming that language are endangered species, So language are like pandas and whatever other species that is now on its way out. And they claim that languages are like that. I have always found that a very difficult metaphor, not because I don’t appreciate its potential rhetorical power, because it does have some power. But I think it’s because it ignores the people who speak the languages. And I think that kind of metaphor is wrongheaded – to presume that we should look to the natural world as ways of understanding language is an error. The natural world is exactly the place we should not look to when we want to understand a phenomenon like language death. We should be looking at, for example, the fate of the political parties, or the fate of religious movements. We should look to the social world to understand language death. Languages die because people stop speaking the language. So, the question is, how do they die? What are the dynamics that produce a population of people that stops speaking their language for various reasons? So yeah, I argue in the book against that very worthy metaphor. I don’t think it helps us. And I think it also risks wrongheaded blame. The last people I want to blame for losing the language, or for abandoning their language – for not speaking and not transmitting their language — are the speakers of the language, because that makes it seems as though they had a choice. It suggest they had a choice and that they decided not to. Sometimes that does happen – sometimes people do decide not to teach the language to their kids. In Gapun, no one had ever made that decision. That’s one of the things that drew me to the village in the first place – that I realized that nobody said, “we’re not gonna teach our language – we don’t like our language, [or] our language is not useful.” Nobody said that. They all said: we like our language. Their reason is, but babies don’t want to speak it. Now that, for me, is really cool, what’s going on there?

So again, these ideas that language death are all very lamentable, it is very sad. But I think the risk in focusing on the language as oppose to focusing on the speaker of the language, is that we can be very patronizing and condescending to the speaker of the language.

Alex Golub: You have the sentence at the end of the book where you say the speaker didn’t abandoned Tayap, Tayap abandoned them. That was such a powerful sentence and also so unexpected. What did you mean when you wrote that?

Don Kulick: Well, again, I mean that it is beyond their control, basically. I mean, I think, one of the things that linguist likes to tell us is that we can revitalize, or we can help to revitalize, and we can. Anyone who wants to get their language revitalized should have all the help that they asked for. If the villagers suddenly decide that they want to use my grammar to help them to revitalize, I would be all for it. I would give them whatever they wanted to do. But the fact is that they don’t want that. And I think that to focus on the language ignores the processes that had resulted the death of the language. And when I say that Tayap had abandoned them, I mean that the historical processes of colonialism, Christianity, capitalism, have actually resulted in a situation that their language is just out of their control. As language always is – language is always out of individual control. But this is a situation where I think the language itself – it’s gone. It’s going. And I mean that in the agentive, in the sense that the language is going. And I draw parallel there with the spirits in a rainforest. You know that my old teacher Raya said that “you know, we use to see those things in the rainforest, we use to see these – eels, crocodiles spirits, now they are not there anymore. They must have all gone.” That’s why we draw parallels to a language. Maybe you can say the same things about them.

Alex Golub: Wow, it’s heavy, I know.

Don Kulick: Yeah. But again, I hope that people, you know, when they read the book – I mean, you’ve mentioned the humor, it’s called the death in a rainforest – and death are never happy events. But I hope that it’s not a total downer [laugh].

Alex Golub: I think everyone should read Don’s book, it’s hilarious.
Marcel Danesi discusses his book on memes and pop culture

January 13th, 2020

https://brill.com/view/title/54309

Interview by Leila Mzali

Leila Mzali: How did you initially become interested in the study of youth and pop culture? How did you realize that memes, while perhaps often dismissed as trivial, were a rich area of research?

Marcel Danesi: I have been teaching pop culture for over two decades. As a young person, I was a musician who played in all kinds of bands. I developed a “feel” for pop music, relating it to my classical training. From this, I became intellectually interested in pop culture as it is based on musical trends. In the last decade I became aware that trends no longer emerge and spread through the traditional channels and media, but that they start as meme fragments online and then migrate and grow into full-fledged movements, which, however, given the nature of cyberspace, often dissipate quickly. So, a “mainstream” musical trend may evolve out of a meme, but it tends to be short lived. The technology has changed the way pop culture is evolving.

Leila Mzali: You touch briefly on Carr’s research on the affects of technology on our brains. Some of the most notable adverse effects you described include shortened attention spans, and reduced recall. While this research is alarming, do you believe that there is anything that we stand to gain through immediate access to information? Specifically, is there anything beneficial to the ephemeral nature of meme exchange?

Marcel Danesi: Yes there is. We can access information quickly and broadly without having to go search for it physically in real space. This allows us to use more information than ever before. Te problem is that it is difficult to extract from the information meaning and relevance. And it seems that we are becoming more and more addicted to information for its own sake. This means that without a meaning-making template to assess it, the information quickly goes from memory, and this mindset may be spreading to other forms of human cognition.

Leila Mzali: You discuss a few examples of violence that were directly or indirectly linked to the Slenderman meme that rose to popularity in the 2010s. How does this example of media’s potential impact on our brains and behavior differ from other historic examples of pop culture inciting violence (ex: Surrealist art and the Black Dahlia murders)? In the context of Baudrillard’s hyperrealism, what do you think it is about meme culture that has arguably launched this phenomenon into overdrive?

Marcel Danesi: This is a great question for which there is no answers–since an answer can only come from a retrospective point of view. We are living in hyperreality right now, guided by technology. This likely means that what happens on a screen, such as a video game, is directive of how we perceive actions and then how we behave accordingly. We have gone through the “looking glass,” to use Lewis Carroll’s metaphor. And what is on the other side is more alluring than real life, which is chaotic, boring, and much more dangerous physically.

Leila Mzali: You note that meme culture allows for amplified access to a ‘Global Village’ and obsolesces national boundaries. Taking into account the participatory nature of meme culture, is there a regional or national society that you find interacts with meme culture in particularly noteworthy or interesting ways?

Marcel Danesi: I am not sure. Memes that are translated soon seem to lose their value or impact. This includes interpreting images, which are subject to cultural coding.

Leila Mzali: You ultimately conclude that meme culture may be an organic and precedented transitional phase of pop culture, according to McLuhan’s media laws. As a scholar who has devoted much attention to pop culture, do you think that we stand to lose something grave by transitioning out of elements of pop culture into new elements meme culture? Considering the typically unintended consequences of reversal and obsolesce that accompanies these transitional phases of media, would you say that there is a public plea or call to action in your work?

Marcel Danesi: I do. Pop culture, as such, and as different from folk culture is a modern experiment. Ironically, it became possible to have a mass pop culture because of early technologies (recording, radio, and so on). It is now technology that may be rendering it obsolescent and ultimately obsolete. That experiment may be over, and there is likely to be another one around the corner, as technology and the marketplace form a new partnership through which artists, thinkers, musicians, etc. may find new ways to make meaning.
Sujatha Fernandes talks about her new book, Curated Stories

January 6th, 2020

https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190618049.001.0001/acprof-9780190618049

Interview by Ben Ale-Ebrahim

Ben Ale-Ebrahim: What led you to first start thinking about storytelling and its relationship to political economy?

Sujatha Fernandes: I was doing research about migrant domestic workers in New York and their labor struggles. What was striking to me was that the workers were being asked to tell their stories over and over in legislative campaigns, but they didn’t feel that it made any difference to their situation. I began to look at other sites too, undocumented students, an Afghan women’s project, and I noticed how storytelling had become a key mode of operation in all of these sites. In fact, in some cases the same storytelling manuals and trainings were being used, many of them originating with the election campaign of Barack Obama. There was something about the neoliberal self-making central to the Obama presidency that was driving these storytelling campaigns. So that was how I connected the storytelling to the neoliberal moment.

Ben Ale-Ebrahim: Throughout Curated Stories, you provide evidence for how the personal narrative has emerged as an important genre for the construction of hegemony in the contemporary neoliberal era. You discuss how the stories of the marginalized, more than those of political elites or dominant classes, are critical to this process (p. 13). Why are the stories of the marginalized so important to “curate”?

Sujatha Fernandes There is much scholarship that focuses on how the dominant narratives of elite intellectual and artistic production have been key in the construction of hegemony – Hollywood films, literature, monuments, museums, political speeches, and so on. I think those are important to study, but the corollary has often been a valorization of the stories of the marginalized as conversely being authentic and getting at the truth of their experience.

That valorization was burst apart by Gayatri Spivak’s essay, “Can The Subaltern Speak?” where she talks about how the voice of the subaltern is itself composed of dominant myths and tropes. Voice is a construction. In the book, I follow her and others to argue that we have to look to the ways in which the stories of the marginalized are shaped and harnessed, through trainings, workshops, and protocols, in order to understand their import. It is precisely the notion that marginalized stories are uniquely authentic that gives them their hegemonic power.

Ben Ale-Ebrahim: In chapters 3, 4, and 5, you describe how neoliberal storytelling projects work to decontextualize and individualize the stories of Afghan women, domestic workers, and undocumented youth, thereby avoiding critiques of broader oppressive political and economic systems that these stories might otherwise imply. Yet, you also describe moments of resistance in each of these cases. What does resistance to neoliberal modes of storytelling look like? As scholars, do we need to look beyond the text to see resistance?

Sujatha Fernandes: In the book, I am looking at the period of the Obama administration, and during this time the resistance to neoliberal storytelling is quite small and momentary. It may involve an Afghan writer going off script to talk about the role of powerful warlords in a post-invasion Afghanistan. It might mean a storytelling trainer who deviates from asking people to tell their stories to re-elect Obama, by contemplating how Obama betrayed the immigrant rights movement by not passing immigration reform. These moments signal a breach in the system but they usually yield to the ordering of the protocol or the training.

We need to learn to read the silences and contradictions in the texts. It is also important to look beyond the text, to employ ethnography to understand how people might be subverting or deviating from the narrative they are being given. The training manuals, protocols, and stories only give us one side of the picture. They don’t show how sometimes those narratives are fiercely contested. For instance, one domestic worker in the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights campaign refused to conform to the limited protocols that required her to only talk about working conditions, hours, and pay. She argued with the advocates leading the campaign, and then in her submitted testimony she went off script to talk about labor exploitation and the global conditions of domestic work. She was not allowed to read out her testimony at the hearing. By looking beyond the text, we can see these moments of resistance.

In a Trump era, this resistance looks quite different. Migrant workers and undocumented students in groups like Movimiento Cosecha have bypassed the path of storytelling advocacy in favor of more direct action and confrontational movements that put forward radical demands. We are also seeing a return to modes of storytelling that link personal experiences to forms of structural oppression. So while the Obama campaign stories linked people’s personal lives to vague values such as hope and family, now we are seeing stories that connect the hardships in people lives directly to problems such as poverty, student debt, and medical debt.

Ben Ale-Ebrahim: In chapter 6, you discuss the Misión Cultura program in Venezuela as an example of a storytelling project that challenges neoliberal ideologies by making connections between the personal narratives of individuals and “political and collective registers” (p. 161). To what extent can this project serve as a model for alternative modes of storytelling, ones that challenge neoliberalism?

Sujatha Fernandes: There are aspects of the Misión Cultura program, as well as others such as the Andean Oral History workshop in Bolivia, that could provide some fruitful ideas. These include non-linear modes for writing personal stories, where one’s life is represented in terms of spheres instead of a chronological or temporal order. In this alternative narrative model, the individual is not centered on a unitary subject as in western-style biographies, but is rather located among spheres of people and communities. These stories re-link the personal, political, and collective registers; they are shaped by participants themselves rather than being edited by others or limited by protocols; and they are located in spaces of the barrio and community-based struggles. I think that these projects might provide some generative lines for rethinking how we tell stories and for developing alternative modes of storytelling.

Ben Ale-Ebrahim: What do you hope scholars and activists interested in storytelling can take away from your book? What is entailed in moving from “curated stories” to “mobilizing stories” (p. 171)?

Sujatha Fernandes: I hope that they might cast a more critical gaze on many of the storytelling platforms that have come to dominate our lives, from Facebook to Ted talks, and the plethora of story coaching agencies, social movement and legislative storytelling models out there. But while many activists themselves have come to reject the dominant storytelling advocacy, I’m hopeful that we might be able to renew a storytelling approach, one that uses art and literary-cultural spaces and methods to convey issues of social injustice. There are strong traditions of this: farm worker movements, Latin American testimonios, and feminist consciousness-raising all used storytelling to great effect as they brought attention to class inequalities, patriarchy, and imperialism. In moving from curated stories to mobilizing stories, it is precisely this attention to the structural conditions of oppression that we must include. And this probably means rethinking the venues where stories are told – away from courtrooms, and the media, and the advocacy organizations where stories can get distorted and compressed for another agenda, toward the small activist circles and the streets where they can change minds and hearts.